Many Mac gamers have fond memories of armored knights battling for their lives against legions of thrall, or tales of frustration related to errant dwarven explosives blasting allies into small chunky bits. With the help of a few dedicated fans such memories continue to be made as the Myth series lives on into the era of OS X.

The Slacker's Guide examines the efforts of the Project Magma team to continue updating the Myth games. With an emphasis on the series' sometimes turbulent journey to a fan updated property, the guide delves into Myth's past, present, and future.

Politics aside, if a game is meant to survive, it will, even if through unconventional methods. To this end, the lads at Project Magma have stepped forward to pick up the reins.

Take Two, despite owning the rights to the game, no longer actually sells the title, the "Buy Now" link on their web site linking to eBay for sales of the game. Not the best support in the world, but still a chance to buy a great title dirt cheap.

Officially unsupported, in relative limbo and with a code base that's become open source, Project Magma has created Mac OS X-native versions of the program that serve to make Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter operational under the current operating system.

In a related article, Gamasutra takes an in-depth look at the effort the all volunteer Project Magma expended in updating a commercial title like Myth II. Everything from the difficulties with operating in a cross platform environment to making the game functional on today's hardware is discussed in detail.

Our core programming team for 1.5 and 1.5.1 consisted of three individuals, each from a different part of the world: the United States, Australia, and Canada. In addition to our core programming team, about half a dozen or more other very important contributors helped with various aspects of our updates, such as handling our website, doing promotional art, and creating installers, as well as the numerous beta testers and the Myth community who assisted in reporting bugs and providing us with feedback.

The thing about most games is that eventually, even after many fun-filled hours, they do indeed come to a close. The world is inevitably saved, the bad guys inevitably thwarted. However, classic board games tend to never grow old. Chess against a worthy adversary can be a unique and challenging experience time and time again. Board games have nearly endless universal appeal, so the folks at Freeverse have taken the liberty of crafting seven visually impressive board games and bundled them into a single suite for the reasonable price of $24.95. Not bad, eh?

Woops, forgot to post this on Friday. IMG has posted a beginner's guide to Vendetta Online, the massively multi-player online role-playing game set in the far future.

Here's a clip:

With the EC-88 being a free purchase this will be the last opportunity to allow yourself the opportunity to fail. All pilots should make use of this and head into the Combat practice with an eye to learn, rather than necessarily be victorious (though winning helps). First, the bots to be targeted should be Kannik or Orun: they may not give the highest reward, but they are weak and poor marksmen. It gives the novice the edge in a fight, even if you are not accustomed to unassisted flight in zero-gravity, zero-resistance environments.

In a recent review, Macworld's Game Room examined Actionsoft's Midnight Mansion. Following in the tradition of such classic titles as Dark Castle and Prince of Persia Midnight Mansion puts players in the shoes of Jack Malone, a treasure hunter seeking to plunder eight mansions filled with an assortment of traps, monsters, and pitfalls. The Game Room gave Midnight Mansion four out of five mice.

From the review:

The mansions are absolutely huge. According to the developer, there are more than 750 rooms to explore in all. To find his treasure, Jack must traverse treacherous pits, make his way over lava-filled pools, climb ladders, shimmy down poles, and most importantly, avoid the monsters that protect these mansions — everything from floating medusa heads that swarm like angry bees to skull spiders that skitter across the floor.

Macworld's Peter Cohen recently reviewed LucasArts' Star Wars Battlefront. Brought to the platform by Aspyr, Battlefront drops players in the middle of epic Star Wars battles. Action can take place in any one of a number of familiar locales from the movies and players can choose their alliance from Imperial, Rebel, Clone Army, or Separatist Droid Army. SWB allows players to engage in fierce ground combat as well as hop aboard a variety of Star Wars vehicles and blast away at everything in sight. Macworld gives Star Wars Battlefront four out of five mice.

From the review:

While some of the more wide-open maps lend themselves to joyrides in whatever vehicles have been put there, others clearly emphasize combat on foot — the cityscapes especially are very claustrophobic. On those maps, hopping behind the controls of a speeder or gunship may actually be more of a liability than a help. Be warned, though: Going up against other players operating vehicles as infantry can be a daunting task, depending on the size — your weapons will have a negligible effect on some of the more massive vehicles in this game (like the elephantine AT-AT, for example).

The Banewood Bog has emerged from the swamps as the newest bonus map for WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne. Banewood Bog is a large map using the Felwood tilset and is recommened for 2vs2 to 4vs4 competition. This new bonus map features eight starting locations, four on each side, and a no mans land in between.

This land is truly cursed. Rivers of poison, filled with demonic bile, eat away at the earth. Ancient wyrms, terrible and great, slumber quietly within the mire. Perhaps you know of a dragon slayer, jobless, up for hire.

As part of the lead up to their BlizzCon event, Blizzard has announced a World of Warcraft movie competition. To enter the contest participants must create a movie from in-game footage and combine it with music from any of Blizzard's past games. Five lucky winners will receive a variety of prizes including tickets to BlizzCon.

Here is the complete list of prizes:

- NVIDIA® GeForce™ 6800 Ultra - 2 Tickets to BlizzCon - Free Year of World of Warcraft - World of Warcraft Cinematic Poster - World of Warcraft Baseball Cap - World of Warcraft Action Figures

As the fall season starts to ramp up, the game articles begin to intensify. Today we have three news items on Myst V: End of Ages, developed by Cyan Worlds. Myst V is the finale to the extremely popular Myst series, and implements several new gameplay mechanics while staying true to the series roots. The hybrid PC / Mac game will be released on September 20th.

Here's a snippet from a preview posted at IGN:

Myst V, like every other title in the series, focuses on the exploration and discovery of D'ni literature, architecture and machinery. It's still, after all, an adventure game which relies heavily on puzzles and exploration to drive its narrative. The Myst universe still splits between a number of worlds, or Ages, and you still need to find special books to access these Ages. But that's basically where the similarities end. Cyan Worlds has gone to great lengths to make sure Myst V retains the appeal of its predecessors while still offering something altogether fresh.

The BBC has also gotten into the game, talking about Myst V and its impact:

I have just met Tim Rylands, a teacher who uses the best-selling PC game series ever, Myst, in the classroom. Tim won this year's Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) award for the best use of technology in the class. PC games in schools are not such a strange sight in the 21st Century. So-called edutainment titles teaching children literacy and numeracy skills in an enjoyable way have had some success.

Myst Worlds recently posted a trailer to the "making of" video included in the Myst V: End of Ages Collector's Edition. Myst V is developed by Cyan Worlds and is currently slated of a hybrid PC / Mac release on September 20th. The trailer traces the history of the Myst series and features some comments by the team at Cyan Worlds.